Frank Willis

I am in the four percent of adults 18-29 who told George Gallup they know "a lot" about Watergate. "Watergate" was the building near the Howard Johnson's where we'd go when school let out for summer and eat clam strips. Water- gate was where we stopped in a carpool one year to fetch the sickly boy for day camp, where I dance in toe shoes to the Beach Boys, in shame. Growing up in Washington I rode D.C. Transit, knew Senators, believed the Washington Monument was God's pencil because my friend Jennifer said so, never went to the Jefferson Memorial, climbed the stone rhino at the Smithsonian, cursed tourists, took exquisite phone messages for my father, a race man, who worked for the government — I held his scrawled hate mail to the light.

I don't care now that Chuck Colson has a prison ministry, or that G. Gordon Liddy ate a rat.

The summer I was eleven Water- gate was something I watched with my grandmother on TV like the best soap opera but also something she would have called "civic," the things you had to know. Today in some way I somehow care that Frank Willis lives with his mother, without employ, was arrested for stealing a $12 pair of sneakers, told Jet it was "a total mix-up," somehow know there is meaning in Jet's tending the fate of this man who saw the tape on the office door latch. Cog, cog, cog in the wheel of history, Frank Willis in Jet these years later, like the shouted spray-paint on an empty garage in my parent's back alley: "Aaron Canaday," his name alone enough, then a sentence, a song: "Slick was Here-O."